A year ago I wrote a note called “The University Doesn’t Teach You to Be Successful” (The University Doesn’t Teach You to Be Successful). This thesis had been rattling around in my head for several years, but I was missing a few pieces to formulate it clearly.
A year and a half has passed, and I’m ready to formulate for myself an answer to the following question: “So why doesn’t the university teach you to be successful?”.
The relationship between student and teacher is very important for a quality education. Does the student believe the teacher’s words? Does he trust the teacher himself? How the student absorbs knowledge depends on this. Students come to a university with certain expectations of getting knowledge that will help them establish themselves in life after university. A first-year student is ready to believe any teacher who happens to come along. But the credit of trust has to be paid back regularly. With a simple check, the knowledge from lectures turns out to be useless on the local labor market, because this lecture knowledge was taken from a book, not gained in the process of the teacher achieving success. The student stops trusting the teacher.
Another thing that undermines trust in the teacher is his low social status, determined by the government’s budget policy and then by the culture of society. How would you describe a grown man who earns only 30 dollars a month by giving lectures? A loser? A failure? Thanks for the compliment! Is that who you should learn success from? A student will not believe a person who has not achieved success in life himself.
I’ll leave the question “Should a teacher who took money from a student for a grade on an exam be considered successful” unanswered. How to answer it is everyone’s personal choice.
The university doesn’t teach you to be successful because there are no people there who know what it is.